Accessing IDE disk with bad sectors freezes the box

[Søren Schmidt]

Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> Hi Soren,
> 
> I have a disk with lot of bad sectors.  When working with it on
> an AMD64 box running 6-CURRENT, accessing bad areas just freezes
> the box completely, without any diagnostics.  The same disk when
> plugged into another i386 box running 4-STABLE works properly by
> issuing errors from the kernel, and reporting EIO to userland.
> 
> Is there something I can do to try to mitigate this issue?

Hmm, depending on the problem the disk has and how the controller is 
implemented the behavior on fatal errors can be unpredictable, 
especially when DMA is involved (some controllers just lock the bus 
completely so our timeout code wont get a chance).
If you switch the disk to PIO mode, does that help any ?


-- 

-Søren